Monday, November 27, 2017

Sunday, September 6, 2015

this image of a tiny baby lying lifeless on the
shore is, like so many, too heartbreaking to watch.what’s
really appalling is that instead of being shocked to take urgent action, our
leaders are stuck in a fighting match on whose problem this is. but for the
first time ever, there’s a glimmer of hope for a solution.

after massive public calls to welcome refugees,german chancellor
merkel and the president of the eu commission are leading efforts to deliver a
new, strong european union plan that would give refuge to people fleeing war
and hunger.france is
on board, but shamefully the uk, hungary, and
other eastern european countries have been blocking this emergency action.
whether eu politicians lead the world to a humane 21st century refugee plan, or
turn their backs, depends on how much they feel the public demands it. that’s
where we come in.

right now we are at a tipping point. it’s time for
us to lead our leaders. eu ministers are meeting in the next few days to set
their positions, so there’s no time to lose.join the call for a plan to give these terrified families safe haven now
-- avaaz will deliver our proposal to all key decision makers before their
summit.

invention of land line telephone brought people together from far away even when they were physically hundreds, even thousands of miles apart. cell phone invention destroyed that by emotionally navigating people far away even when they are physically next to each other.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

photographs of eyes affixed
to dwellings in rio
de janeiro
are part of google’s street art project database.creditmosa

street art in dallas by the duo known as faile, captured by a group with street
view technology.creditdallas contemporary

paris — there’s a portrait of an
anonymous chinese man chiseled into a wall in shanghai, a colorful mural in
atlanta and black-and-white photographs of eyes that the french artist jr
affixed to the houses of a hillside favela in rio de janeiro. these are among
the images of more than 4,000 works included in a vast new online gallery of
street art that google is unveiling here on tuesday.

called thestreet art
project, the database was created by the company’s paris-basedgoogle cultural institute.
using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were
captured with google’s street view camera technology, it includes street art
from around the globe, including work that no longer exists, like the 5pointz
murals in long islandcity, queens, or the walls of the tour paris 13 tower in france.

with the initiative, google is the
latest organization to wade into debates about how or whether to
institutionalize, let alone commercialize, art that is ephemeral and often
willfully created subversively. a private database of public art, it also poses
questions about how to legally preserve what in some cases might be considered
vandalism.

in a sense, google is formalizing
what street art fans around the world already do: take pictures of city walls
and distribute them on social media. yet for google to do so could raise
concerns, given the criticism of its aggressive surveillance tactics,
especially in europe, where its street view satellite
mapping is widely seen as a violation of privacy.

google is taking pains to avoid
offense by setting strict conditions. it will include only images provided by
organizations that sign a contract attesting that they own the rights to them.
it will not cull through street view images but will provide the technology to
organizations that want to use it to record street art legally. some groups
have provided exact locations of the artworks; others have not.

aiming to steer clear of one of the
most contentious debates in the street art world, google says it will not
include images from groups seeking to sell the art or images of it. many street
artists object to their public work being sold without their permission. for
instance, banksy, the anonymous british street artist, has objected to attempts to
sell his artworks after they are stripped from public walls, saying the
stencils belong to the community.

google also said it would remove
images if artists complained to the groups that contributed them to the
database.

the company sees the platform as a
way of making more art available to viewers. “i’m not treating street art as
anything different from what i would do with the impressionist collection i’m
getting on art project,” said amit sood, director of the google cultural
institute, referring to aphilanthropic initiativethat has provided technical support to
more than 460 museums to help put their collections online.

the institute, which was founded in
2011 and has a staff of around 30 engineers, has also helped create online
archives for historic figures likenelson mandelaand used street view to provide
multimedia renderings of unesco world heritage sites likeangkor wat in cambodia.

mr. sood acknowledges that the street
art program, like the cultural institute, is a way for google to generate good
will in privacy-conscious europe. “it helps make people realize we are doing a lot of things
that actually support the community,” he said.

the database is searchable by artist,
city, genre and other categories, and even includes a special section on new york walls of the 1990s. among the 30
institutions that have furnished images so far are the museum of the city of new york; the dallas contemporary exhibition
space in texas; the city speaks in atlanta, which finances street art and
disseminates it online; and the museum of street art in france.

working with the french organization
project tour paris 13, google filmed the rooms of tour 13 in paris, which had been entirely covered in
street art, before its owners destroyed the building. google also used a
powerful camera to capture works by the portuguese graffiti artist vhils, who
uses an electric chisel to carve images into the sides of buildings. viewers
can zoom in on the chisel marks.

shepard fairey, who is best known for
his image of president obama, said he had “no problem” with being included in
the database. “i’ve always used my street art to democratize art, so it
would be philosophically inconsistent for me to protest art democratization
through google,” he said through a publicist. and the belgian artist known as
roa said he would be pleased to be part of it, “as long as they credit the
mural to me, and it’s not being used for commercial purposes or corporations.”

some past attempts to
institutionalize street art have not gone over so well. the police commissioner
oflos angeles criticizeda 2011 exhibition called “art in the
streets” at that city’s museum of contemporary art, arguing that it encouraged
vandalism.

philippe vergne, who took over as
director of the los angeles museum in january, acknowledged,
“street art often comes with a bad reputation where people don’t know how to
discriminate art from vandalism.” lois stavsky, who runs the nonprofit groupstreet art nyc,
said that most street artists liked the idea of enabling more people to see
their work. she said she had sorted through thousands of photos taken by her
group at 5pointz over the years and painstakingly uploaded hundreds to the
google platform. the owners of thebuilding painted over the artlast fall and plan to demolish it to
make way for luxury condos.

“the fact that 5pointz was
whitewashed, it was covered up with white paint, just proves how important it
is to document this,” she said.

the google street art platform is to
be presented at a news conference at the palais de tokyo, a contemporary art
space owned partly by the city of paris, which is opening an exhibition on
saturday called “the lasco project,” a play on words referring
to the prehistoric art painted in the caves of lascaux. street artists have been invited to
create works on the museum’s basement walls.

on a recent afternoon, the new york street artist futura was wearing yellow
rubber gloves as he spray-painted black dots on a striped wall for the paris exhibition.

the artist, 58, said he liked the
idea of google’s street art project, given that he and other artists mostly
learn about one another’s work online anyway. “instagram accounts — most
artists are there,” he said.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

“do you want to sell sugary drinks for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change people's lives?” when steve jobs said this to pepsi executive john scully to lure him to apple, what he did not know (even though he meant good) was that his devices would make the new generation visually impaired, if not totally blind, by the age of 40 (and that is a liberal estimate, it could very well be 30!) because of the close proximity of harmful light his devices bring to the eyes of kids... (this is my own statement, not a quote from someone else's statement, after observing my daughter the way she constantly uses her ipod for chat). now that is still a change in people's lives (even though that change he did not mean to bring about)!